Wednesday, November 01, 2006

According to Frost and Sullivan, the pharmaceutical industry spends nearly one third of its $50 billion of research and development dollars on kinase inhibitor therapeutics. Kinases are a class of proteins which are known to signal certain illnesses, including some cancers, to the "on" or diseased state. Kinase inhibitors effectively can turn the "on" signal to an "off" state. Interest in this area has been propelled by the success of Gleevec, a multibillion drug from Novartis which was the first approved drug to directly turn off the signal of a protein known to cause a cancer.